Peter Brown
CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY:
THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
When taking lunch with his colleagues at University
College, London, my friend and mentor Arnaldo Momigliano
(so I am told) was in the habit of turning to his neighbor and
asking: "Tell me, what are you worrying about?" He was, of
course, asking that person about the progress of his or her
research. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced
that Momigliano's peremptory question was well posed. The
writing of history is largely about the act of "worrying about"
problems that refuse to go away. For that reason, it remains
a strenuous and somewhat messy activity. Historiography is
as much a story of the "worries" experienced by historians
in the face of intractable problems as it is a narrative of
triumphant methodological breakthroughs.
Current enthusiasm for the application of new
methodologies to the study of the world of late antiquity
should not cause us to overlook this fact. No methodology
descends majestically from the realm of "theory," like a fairy
princess, to transform the field with an imperious and
effortless wave of her wand. Life would be more restful if
this were so. But my experience has been that new
methodologies (and the new historiographical strategies
which spring from them) are usually brought to the fore by
old worries. They are the result of a growing sense that cen-
tral problems in the understanding ofthe past demand a new
approach, if any progress is to be made at all. Methodologies
borrowed from fields other than the historical sciences are
like so many explosive charges: they are applied so as to
detonate and to break up the logjams of idees rer;ues that
pile up all too easily around our interpretation of central
developments in the history of our period.
In order to appreciate the effect of new approaches on
the study of the world of late antiquity, the historiographer
has to relive something of the sharp sense of hunger often
experienced by scholars. Scholars often find that they have
to scan the horizon like the inhabitants of a .antique
coastal city in a time of shortage, watching for the arrival of
the grain ship that would relieve their famine. The discovery
of a new document, the appearance of a pertinent article,
the adoption of an insight borrowed from another discipline:
these are not so many disembodied moves in a
methodological game; they signal the end of periods of
intellectual deprivation.
For this reason, historiography is essentially an exercise
in gratitude. It makes each one of us realize how little we
can know for ourselves and how much we depend upon the
work of others. We cannot "go it alone." Scholars whose
methods and whose approaches to the late antique period
are often very different from our own, methodologies whose
relevance to the study oflate antiquity we had not hitherto
considered: these frequently prove to be the grain-ships
which sail into port to end our famine.
Hence it is a great pleasure to speak, in the company of
so many friends whose work has, so frequently, relieved
, so many periods of famine in my own research, about a
problem which few students of the world oflate antiquity
can avoid, and about which I have found myself worrying,
now, for all of forty years: that is, the problem of conver-
sion and of its relation to the process ofChristianization in
the late antique and early medieval world. To return to such
a theme has made me realize the extent of my debt of gra-
titude to the works of so many scholars, many of whom are
with us on this occasion. Because of this work, a crucial
aspect of the world oflate antiquity has come to look very
different now, at the end of the 1990s, from the way it
looked to us all, as we began our study of the period, in the
early 1960s.
So let us turn back some forty years, to those innocent
days when (ifI remember correctly) we all knew what "con-
version" was and what was implied in the process known as
"Christianization." These were two very different things,
studied by two different groups of scholars.
"Conversion" was a matter for the religious historian. All
that we needed to know about conversion in the ancient world
and in early Christianity had been summed up, in 1933, in a
short but weighty book that has remained a classic: Conver-
sion: The Old and the New in Religionfrom Alexander the
The Past Before Us, 2004, p. 103 a 117
104
Great to Augustine ofHippo, by Arthur Darby Nock 1 Nock
had insisted that, in the polytheistic societies of the ancient
world, "conversion" was an alien notion. Certain cults,
associated with certain particularly vivid gods and goddesses,
might generate in individuals or in entire groups a high degree
of all-consuming devotion-as do the cults of individual
saints within the Catholic church. But this was "adhesion."
It was not "conversion." Such intense devotions
led to an acceptance of new worships as useful
supplements and not as substitutes, and they did not
involve the victory of a new way of life in place of the
old.
Such adhesion (so Nock insisted) did not amount to con-
version:
By conversion we mean the reorientation of the soul of
an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference
or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning
which implies a consciousness that a great change is
involved, that the old was wrong and the new was right. 2
We must remember that, like many great and patient
scholars, Nock had made his own the common sense of his
own times. Hence it is not surprising to find that Max Weber
lurks uncited behind the emphasis which Nock placed on
the distinctive nature of the "prophetic" religions, such as
Judaism and Christianity, and on the irrevocable and all-
demanding claims that they made on their adherents. Nock
contrasted the claims to exclusive loyalty made by the
"prophetic" religions with the more ad hoc and opportunistic
nature of the "traditional" religions of the Greco-Roman
world. On this topic, Nock wrote with such effortless grace
and with so little overt reflection, that the limitations of
Weber's model (indeed, his dependence on Weber at all)
largely escaped the notice of his readers.3
As for the subjective experience of conversion itself,
Nock's acknowledged master was William James. It was
from James's Varieties of Religious Experience that he
derived a "high density" notion of conversion. Conversion
involved
a passion ofwillingness and acquiescence . .. a sense of
clean and beautiful newness within and without. 4
1. A. D. Nock, Conversion. The Old and the New in Religionfrom
Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford, 1933: re-
print, Baltimore, 1998).
2. Nock, Conversion, 7.
3. Nock, Conversion, 2-3. For a clear summary of the limits of
Max Weber's categorization, see now R.W. Hefner, "World-Buil-
ding and the Rationality of Conversion," Conversion to
Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a
Great Transformation, ed. R.W. Hefner (Berkeley, 1993): 3-44.
4. Nock, Conversion, 7-8.
PETER BROWN
The sense of irrevocable commitment and of the obliga-
tion placed upon adherents to adjust their lives and their'
beliefs to,a universal and intelligible order, taken from Max
Weber, combined in Nock's work with William James's
interest ih conversion, as the experience par excellence of
personal discontinuity. These two considerations led Nock
to declare, at the outset of his treatment, that
.. was therefore in these [polytheist} rivals ofJudaism
6nd Christianity no possibility ofanything which can be
called conversion. 5
Nock's Conversion has remained obligatory and
nourishing reading for all students of early Christianity in
its Greco-Roman religious context, up to around A.D. 300.
At the same time, it is a profoundly frustrating book for those
of us who want to take the story forward into late antiquity
proper, by studying the process of "Christianization", by
which Christianity became the predominant religion of the
Roman world and of significant parts of the non-Roman
Middle East, between A.D. 300 and 600. For the book is a
study of the near-convergence of groups whose religious
I worlds have been defined, from the outset, to be incommen-
surable. The more deeply the reader enters into the mentality
of Greco-Roman polytheism, the less likely it seems that
any polytheist would ever become a Jew or a Christian. The
two groups are shown to have lived, above all, at different
levels of intensity. Like enthusiastic young men at the fair,
lining up at a "Try Your Strength" machine, the pagan cults
are invited, by Nock, to ring the bell by striking the button
with all their force. None rings the bell. For no pagan cult
demanded of its adherents more than "adhesion." None had
the universal organization associated with the Christian
church with which to enforce more than "adhesion." Only
Christianity, we know, will ring the bell and win the prize.
For reasons which Nock does not analyze (and which still
provoke lively debate among scholars 6) the Jews apparently
declined to enter into this particular form of religious mus-
cle-flexing. Only Christianity wished for proselytes, and only
the Christian church possessed the organizational structures
needed to generate the "impact" on society that rendered
proselytization both effective and permanent.
In considering Nock's views on the impact of Christianity,
we should remember that, behind Nock's use of his near-
contemporaries, William James and Max Weber, there lay a
bedrock of Enlightenment thought on the nature of early
Christianity and on the reasons for its progress in the Ro-
man world. This image of Christianity was memorably
summarized, in 1781, by Edward Gibbon in the famous
fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his Decline and Fall of
5. Nock, Conversion, 14.
6. For changing attitudes in Judaism, see now M. Goodman, Mis-
sion and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of
the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1994).
 ..
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CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
the Roman Empire. For Gibbon shared with the philosopher
David Hume the assumption that, in themselves, religious
ideas were vague and insubstantial notions. To make progress
in society, they required a high level of human maintenance.
Only if religious notions'were supported by a zest for power,
by "party spirit" and by a large measure of intellectual
obstinacy allied to firm institutional structures could they
impinge effectively upon the weightier, because more real,
concerns of humanity.7 Seen in this light, Greco-Roman
paganism was as frail as mist. Not only did it lack intellectual
cohesion. It lacked the interested support ofthe ruling clas-
ses.
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the
Roman world were all considered by the people as equally
true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the
magistrates as equally useful.
Most important of all
the princes and magistrates of ancient Rome were
strangers to those principles which inspired and
authorized the inflexible obstinacy of the Christians in
the cause of truth. 8
And, as Gibbon seemed to demonstrate conclusively
throughout The Decline and Fall, it was that "inflexible
obstinacy ... in the cause of truth" which won the day.9
Nock entered with greater sympathy into the religiosity
of the upper classes of the Roman world than did Gibbon,
but he was at one with Gibbon in treating Christianity as
incommensurable with paganism. By reason oftheir lack of
tolerance for other cults, by their ability to organize and,
above all, by reason of their determination to spread their
faith to all unbelievers, the future lay with the Christians,
even if, in the year A.D. 300, they formed only a small pro-
portion of the population of the Roman world.
For it was the conversion of Constantine in 312, and his
public support ofthe Christian church from then onwards to
his death in 337-a support continued by all future Roman
emperors, with the short exception ofthe three-year reign of
Julian the Apostate (361-363)-which, as it were, acted as
the "tiebreaker" between two incommensurable religious
systems. It opened up to the more aggressive, coherent and
ambitious Christian minority the channels of state power.
As J. B. Bury wrote, in 1923,
7. Peter Brown, "Gibbon's Views on Culture and Society in the
Fifth and Sixth Centuries," Daedalus 105 (1976): 73-88, now in
Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 198'2): 22-48,
at 28-35.
8. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
chapter 2 and 16, ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1909), 1:31 and 2:87.
9. For a very different view, see now H. A. Drake, Constantine
and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, MD,
2000): 20-34.
_,,*1-,
- - - - - - - -- - - - - -- ---=-------=-
105
It must never be forgotten that Constantine s revolution
was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by
an autocrat in disregard and defiance ofthe vast majority
of his subjects. 10
For the period from 312 onwards, therefore, interest in
the theme of "conversion" has tended to give way to interest
in the theme of"Christianization." And in "Christianization"
scholars have tended to see, above all, an exercise in power.
What holds their attention is the active imposition of
Christianity upon the majority of the population, by the Chris-
tian church, working in alliance with the Christian empire.
The rapid and often dramatic desacralization ofpagan centers
of worship (achieved by the end of the fourth century) was
followed by the slow absorption into the Christian churches
of an entire pagan popUlation which found that they had
nowhere else to worship.ll
Inevitably, therefore, the related themes of
"Christianization" and of "religious coercion" have tended
to coalesce in modem scholarship of the later empire. 12 My
own study of Augustine of Hippo began, in the early 1960s,
with a lively interest on my part in the manner in which
Augustine accepted and justified the suppression of pagans,
Donatists and other heretics by the Roman state. It was in
his thought on this issue that Augustine appeared to me to
look directly towards the future of medieval Catholic
Christendom. As a medievalist recently converted to the study
of late antiquity, that future was always present to me. The
alliance between Christianity and the state which rendered
possible the Christianization of the Roman world seemed
an entirely natural phenomenon: it formed part of the
I emergence of a recognizably "medieval" society already in
the last centuries of antiquity.
This meant that the nature of the Roman state was central
to the problem of Christianization. Those who studied
religious coercion found themselves following, in
considerable detail, the manner which the late Roman state
flexed its muscles. It was not a pretty sight. In the fourth
century A.D.,
Imperial government . .. was unmatched in Greco-Ro-
man history in its scale and complexity of organization,
in its physical incidence upon society, the rhetorical ex-
10. J. B. Bury, The Later Roman Empire (reprint, New York, 1958),
1:366.
11. See now P. Brown, "Christianization and Religious Conflict,"
Cambridge Ancient History 13: The Late Empire AD 337-425,
ed. A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (Cambridge; New York, 1999):
632-64.
12. P. Brown, "Religious Coercion in the Later Roman Empire:
the Case of North Africa," History 47 (1963): 283-305 and "St.
Augustine's Attitude to Religious Coercion," Journal ofRoman
Studies 54 (1964): 107-16, now in Religion and Society in the
Age of Saint Augustine (London, 1972): 301-31 and 260-78
respectively.
106
travagance with which it expressed, and the calculated
violence with which it attempted to impose, its will. 13
Looking back on the process of Christianization within
the Roman empire in around A.D. 600, Pope Gregory the
Great likened it, appropriately enough, to the riding of a
rhinoceros. 14 This vast beast of unpredictable temper had
once trampled on the martyrs. Now it was guided, on a light
rein, by the Catholic church. But it had not forgotten how to
trample. It now suppressed paganism and heresy. A good
Byzantine "Roman" in this as in so much else, Gregory's
first letter to the newly-converted Saxon king lEthelbert of
Kent, in 601, urged the king to
suppress the worship of idols; overthrow their buildings
and shrines; strengthen the morals [the Christian
behavior] of your people . . . by exhorting them and
terrifying them . .. [For] It was thus that Constantine,
the most religious emperor, converted the Roman state
from the false worship ofidols and subjected it to Almighty
God . .. turning to him with all his heart, together with
the nations under his rule. 15
I have frequently observed that not every scholar has a
stomach for such matters. It is revealing that historians of
religion in the ancient world, and especially historians of
the early Church, have tended to withdraw discreetly from
the study of the post-Constantinian empire. They do not want
to be implicated in the abrasive new world brought about by
the conversion of Constantine in 312. "Conversion," as Ar-
thur Darby Nock had studied in a world of freely
competing cults, seemed to have little to do with the process
of strenuous Christianization from on top that set in after
312. "Christianizing the Roman Empire" is a subject which,
up to the present, has usually been left to connoisseurs of
violence. It is studied most confidently by those whose ear
is attuned to the unremitting, harsh "noise" of a triumphant
Christianity as it allied itself with coercive power on every
level of society-from the overwhelming rhetorical violence
ofthe imperial laws, through the recurrent brutal impact of
Christian activists on Jews and pagans, to the daily violence
with which masters browbeat their slaves and landowners
their peasants into conformity to the new religion. 16
Furthermore, just as the "Christianization" of the Roman
world could be assumed to have been brought about by a
final, violent spasm of authority on the part of the Roman
13. J. Matthews, The Roman Empire ofAmmianus (London, 1989):
253. See now (for a less dramatic view) J. Harries, Law and
Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge; New York, 1999).
14. Gregory, Moralia 31.4.5.
15. Gregory, Registrum 11.37, included (significantly) in Bede,
Ecclesiastical History 1.32.
16. R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100-
400) (New Haven, CT, 1984).
PETER BROWN
state, so Christianization was believed to have come to a
virtual standstill at the frontiers of the Roman empire. In
late antiqUity, there were no such things as "missions" to the
barbarians. The northern barbarians adopted Christianity
only after they had come to settle on Roman territory, in the
late fourth and fifth centuries, or, at a later time, when they
became the object of carefully orchestrated imperial
diplo,matic missions. 17 From 312 onwards,
was with the myth of empire. It took place,
effectively, within the structures of the strongest state in the
known world. IS Not surprisingly, such a situation has attracted
the attention of scholars as the somber "foundation charter"
for the relations between Christian Europe and the non-Chris-
tian world. 19 By the year 1600, all over the world, as far
apart as Moscow and Lima, themes such as the absolutist
nature of the early modem state, the pros and cons of religious
toleration and the strategies for the forcible conversion of
non-Christian populations were discussed in terms of an
armory oftexts written at the time ofthe Christianization of
the Roman empire, in the centuries between the conversion
of Constantine in 312 and the death of Pope Gregory the
,Great in 603. 20
Last, but not least, of course, it could be assumed that so
blunt and so high-handed a process got what it deserved:
limited success. While "conversion," ideally, involved a
narrative marked by dramatic closure, the grey reality of
"Christianization" was doomed to have no happy ending.
The Christian world of late antiquity, for all its brilliance,
was ringed by cowed populations of "semi-Christians." They
were still there, a thousand years later. The density of "pagan
survivals" that seemed to characterize the folk-Christianity
of medieval and early modem Europe served to confirm the
strong suspicion of many modem scholars that so much
sound and fury in the late Roman period had, in fact, done
little to change the beliefs of the majority of the popula-
'--
17. E. A. Thompson, "Christianity and the Northern Barbarians,"
The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth
Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963): 56-78.
18. G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of
monotheism in late antiquity (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
19. P. Brown, "Approaches to the Religious Crisis of the Third
Century A.D.," English Historical Review 83 (1968): 542-58, now
in Religion and Society, 74-93, at 91-3.
20. S. McCormack, "Ubi Ecclesia? Perceptions of Medieval Eu-
rope in Spanish America," Speculum 69 (1994): 74-100;
1. Sevcenko, "A Neglected Source of Muscovite Political
Ideology," Harvard Slavic Studies 2 (1954): 141-79, now in
Byzantium and the Slavs (Cambridge, MA, 1991): 49-87. For
the continuity of a less state-centered view of the holy man as
"apostolic" missionary, see now R. M. Price, "The holy man and
Christianization from the apocryphal apostles to St. Stephen of
Perm," The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Mid-
dle Ages, ed. J. Howard-Johnston and P. A. Haywood (Oxford;
New York, 1999): 215-38.
CONVERSION AND CHRlSTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
tion. 21 "Christianization" had not brought about "conver-
sion," as Arthur Darby Nock had defined it. As Robin Lane
Fox has reminded us, in the opening pages of his vivid book,
Pagans and Christians, the reign of Constantine
was only a landmark in the history of Christianization,
that state which is always receding, Iikefoll employment
or a garden without weeds. 22
That is how the story stood, some forty years ago, in the
1960s. Recent literature has left the basic outlines of this
narrative largely unchanged. And this is for a reason which
the conscientious historian must recognize immediately, if
with some discomfort: it is, alas, what the evidence seems to
say.
It is here, I think, that the time has come to reassess a
centuries-old tradition of historiography on the Christianiza-
tion of late antique and early medieval Europe. In order to
do this, I would like to take advantage, for a moment, of the
privilege ofliving in the 1990s and no longer in the 1960s.
It is a pleasure to report how much water has come to flow,
oflate, under this particular bridge. First, in general, I would
like to take advantage of modem studies of the role of
"representations" in the formation of historical narratives.
In the light of these insights, I would suggest that a particular
narrative ofthe successes and failures ofChristianization in
the late Roman and early medieval periods is what the texts
appear to tell us, and that we should approach this narrative
with unrelenting "hermeneutical suspicion." Second, and in
a more particular manner, I would like to illustrate this sus-
picion by catching a significant part of the Christian narra-
tive inflagrante delicto,.as it were, "in the making." We can
do this through the work and preaching of a person who was
both the classic example of the Christian convert and the
principal theorist of Christian religious coercion-that is,
Augustine of Hippo. It is easier to do this now than ever
before. A new body of evidence has become available since
1992, in the form of hitherto unknown, extensive sermons
on the conversion of pagans and of Donatist schismatics,
preached by Augustine in the first decade of his episcopate,
between 397 and 404. 23 These sermons enable us to hear,
21. R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to
Eighth Centuries (New Haven, CT, 1997); The Pagan Middle
Ages, ed. L. Mitis; trans. Tanis Guest (Woodbridge, .Suffolk,
1998).
22. R. Lane-Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1987): 21.
23. First edited by F. Dolbeau in Revue des etudes augustiniennes
37 (1991) to 40 (1994) and Recherches augustiniennes 26 (1992),
now in F. Dolbeau, Augustin d'Hippone: Vingt-six sermons au
peuple d'Afrique (Paris, 1996) and translated by E. Hill, The
Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century.
Sermons III/XI: Newly Discovered Sermons (Hyde Park, NY,
1997). On these discoveries and their implication for the study
ofAugustine, see now P. Brown,Augustine ofHippo: A Biography
(reprint, London, 2000), "Epilogue. Chapter One: New
107
once again (as we had never expected to hear it), the voice
of a major representative of late antique Christianity,
"thinking aloud" as it were, on the horizons, the possibilities
and the potential for failure of the Catholic church at a
decisive moment in the history of Roman Africa. Third, it is
only when we have heard this voice, in its precise
circumstances, that we can realize the extent to which all
subsequent perception of the process ofChristianization in
Western Christianity (that of modem scholars included) has
remained indebted to the views expressed by Augustine in
this crucial decade. We still view the process of
Christianization through lenses first ground for us by Augus-
tine. Remove these lenses, and the entire process may look
significantly different.
On the issue of texts as evidence, I think that we have
come to realize, since the 1960s, the extent to which the
texts themselves were part of the process ofChristianization.
They can not be treated as neutral evidence for a process
that happened, as it were, outside themselves. They were
part of the process itself. Christian texts worked in symbiosis
with what we can assume to have been a wider orchestration
of oral and visual strategies. They created a "representation"
of Christianization which gathered momentum over the
generations. 24 We should not underestimate the power of such
representations to influence the process which they claimed
to describe. For they imposed a sense of momentum and,
above all, a satisfactory sense of closure on what remained
an inconclusive and spasmodic succession of incidents.
Christian representations varied greatly from place to
place, and from generation to generation. Each drew widely
on contemporary culture for the narrative sequences that
rendered them credible and satisfying. The narrative
sequences adopted had the advantage of appealing to well-
established and widespread traditions. Thus, Roman notions
of triumph followed by instant peace, associated with the
suppression of usurpers and the conquest of barbarians,
provided one strong strain. So did the apparently
instantaneous nature of cures brought about by exorcism. 25
In Egypt, pre-Roman Pharaonic themes of the conflict and
eventual withdrawal of the gods played a similar role. 26
Spectacular events, often connected with the initiative of
Christian emperors, such as the prohibition of sacrifice and
the destruction of major temples, were presented as having
Evidence," at 441-81, esp. 459-61. The reader should note that
Dolbeau's original chronology (which dated one group of ser-
mons to 397) has been challenged by P. M. Hombert, Nouvelles
recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris, 2000).
24. P. Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the
Christianization of the Roman World (Cambridge; New York,
1995): 4-6.
25. F. Thelamon, Parens et chretiens au IV' siecle (paris, 1981):
252.
26. P. Chuvin, A Chronicle ofthe Last Pagans; trans. B. A. Archer
(Cambridge, MA, 1990): 67-8.
108
brought about the instant "conversion" of entire regions. In
an abrupt and fully visible manner, the victory of God over
the gods was rendered palpable on earth. End of story. Such
"representations" of the end of paganism had the effect of
suspending time. They excised from public consciousness
the ugly long haul-the "mopping up" of a religion wounded
by the dramatic desecration of its sanctuaries.
These were not the only representations available. InAr-
menia, by contrast, triumph was not presented as irreversible.
An Iranian substratum in Armenian culture had always
stressed the permanent and unresolved war of good and evil.
The land of Armenia was seen as subject to a perpetual cy-
cle of order and chaos. Moments of majestic harmony
between Christianity and the Kings of Armenia might be
rapidly succeeded by collapse into barbaric disorder. Such
a representation allowed Christian Armenian writers from
the late fifth century onwards to write in a remarkably
disabused manner ofthe vicissitudes of Christianity in their
region and about the superficial nature of the adoption of
the new faith by the leaders of lay society. For them, the
theme of national apostasy was quite as intelligible as was
the theme oftriumph.27
Not all Christian texts, of course, took the form of
triumphal representations of Christianization. But all texts
were written in such a way as to minimize the ambiguities of
real life. As Garth Fowden has reminded us, in his essay on
"Religious Communities" in the Harvard Guide to Late
Antiquity, one of the most remarkable features of late
antiquity was the creation of rival "textual communities,"
Christian, Jewish and pagan. 28 Fellow believers came to
define themselves, above all, in terms of their shared body
of texts. What is striking is the extent to which these texts
excluded reference to any other community than their own.
The others are either pointedly absent or travestied for
internal consumption. This means that the unscripted
complexities of real life, in which symbiosis, dialogue, and
even the possibility of human sympathy between members
of differing religions could be assumed to occur, were
carefully written out ofthe texts.
27. N. Garsoian, "The two voices of Armenian mediaeval
historiography: the Iranian Index," Studia Iranica 25 (1996): 7-
43, now in Church and Culture in Early Medieval Armenia
(Aldershot, 1999) and J. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia
(Cambridge, MA, 1987): 126-30, on the Buzandaran
Patmut'iwnk' of P'awstos Buzand; see also A. and J.-P. MaM,
Histoire de l'Armenie de Moise de Khorene (Paris,1993): 57, on
Moses Khorenats'i. See now A. E. Redgate, The Armenians (Ox-
ford, 1998): 116-27. For another, equally exotic, representation
of the conversion of Georgia, see Thelamon, Parens et chretiens,
85-122, with C. Horn, "8t. Nino and the Christianization ofPa-
gan Georgia," Medieval Encounters 4 (1998): 242-64.
28. G Fowden, "Religious Communities," LateAntiquity: A Guide
to the Postclassical World, ed. G Bowersock, P. Brown and O.
Grabar (Cambridge, MA, 1999): 82-106.
PETER BROWN
As a result, one of the most delicious occupations open
to a modern historian of late antiquity is to take advantage
ofpost-mod,.ern exhortations to exercise ''hermeneutical sus-
picion" whe,h confronted by such texts. It is instructive to
read them '{against the grain." Modern methodologies have
taught us to do this with greater skill than before. We no
longer read late antique accounts of Christianization simply
so as to assess their merit as evidence, deciding ,how many
of thejr statements can be accepted and how many should
be discounted as being the result of bias or rhetorical
exaggeration. There is, of course, still room for such old-
time reading. But now it is, as it were, the "texture" of the
texts themselves which has come to catch our attention. We
read our texts, now, for signs of inner strain. We listen, in
them, to catch the voice of excluded interlocutors. We
develop, through them, a sensitivity to the ambiguities of
real life that are resolved with such deceptive trenchancy
within the texts themselves.
Above all, it is a special pleasure to light upon an anec-
dote (maybe no more than a sentence), which betrays a reality
that runs counter to the intent of the narrative in which it is
I included. This is notoriously slow work. It has to be
conducted along the very edge of the field of vision presented
by the texts. It is often most effective when it draws atten-
tion to those fragments of information that have tended to
be brushed to one side as "unrepresentative" in the light of
our conventional master-narratives of the period. In all of
this, one cannot be too pointilliste. For such hints oftension
within the text, combined with the stray, incongruous detail,
serve to introduce a sense of human complexity into texts
whose evidence all too often encourages us to write a history
of religious change in late antiquity that privileges the bullies,
the loudmouths and the inhabitants of ivory towers.
To take one example: when I came to write in around
1992 on "The Limits oflntolerance" in my book Authority
and the Sacred, I was surprised by the richness of the
evidence for a late antique convivencia among pagans, Jews
and Christians. This was a convivencia different in its basis
from that of medieval Spain, of course, but quite as enduring.
Yet most of the evidence for such peaceful coexistence was
garnered from the very edges of a body oftexts, the bulk of
which denied the notion oftoleration with chilling intensity
and internal consistency.29
For this reason, I am particularly pleased to note that Glen
Bowersock has recently delineated a similar situation, on
the ground, as it were, in his contribution to a recent volume
on Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Pa-
lestine. 3D Bowersock makes plain that the province of Pales-
tine and its neighboring regions formed a part ofthe Roman
29. Brown, Authority and the Sacred, 29-54.
30. G Bowersock, "The Greek Moses," Religious and Ethnic
Communities in Later Roman Palestine, ed. H. Lapin (College
Park, MD, 1998): 31-48.
 CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
world where conventional narratives of Christianization had
little or no explanatory value. We are dealing with a region
that enjoyed a pax byzantina of some three hundred years-
a peace as prolonged as any enjoyed under the classical
empire. In this period, the differing communities maintained
a rare equilibrium. The building of synagogues proceeded
at much the same pace as that of Christian churches. Both
churches and synagogues highlighted their status and flaunted
their opulence by resorting, in an unashamed manner, to
shared traditions of secular imagery.31 In such a Palestine,
Libanius the sophist could expect the references in his letters
to Odysseus, Achilles and Telephus to be understood by the
Jewish patriarch, the nasi Gamaliel. 32 A recently-discovered
villa showed mosaics of Dionysus, Phaedra and Hippolytus.
The owner could have been Jewish, Christian or pagan.
Whatever their religion, he and his guests were encouraged
to feel protected, in their prosperity, from hostile envious
powers by the sheer "charm" of a "beautifully woven" late
classical mosaic-its jolly colors and plump protagonists
(Hippolytus, for instance, wore up-to-date late Roman
hunting gear) radiated stability and an enjoyment of the good
things oflife with a mute certainty that embraced all faiths.33
Among such villa owners, one suspects, class counted for
more than religious affiliation.
In many cities, pagan temples had, indeed, undergone
surgical "desacralization" through the destruction of their
cella, their holy of holies. But their fayades remained intact
for centuries to come. 34 Polytheists still benefited from an
"ideology of silence." It was sufficient that they had been
declared no longer to exist. 35 This did not mean that they
joined the Christian churches-or, indeed, that they were
encouraged to do SO.36 Nor were the public rallying points
of a Christian empire unambiguously clear for all to see. In
Caesarea Maritima, the Tax Office boasted an
unexceptionable Christian mosaic-no less than a citation
from Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans: "Jfyou would not
fear the authority, do good. " 37 But, at the same time, the
31. Bowersock, "Greek Moses," 43-5. See now P. Baumann,
Spatantike Stifter im Heiligen Land. Darstellungen und
Inschriften in Kirchen, Synagogen une Privathauser (Wiesba-
den, 1999).
32. Bowersock, "Greek Moses," 35-40.
33. A. Ovadiah et al., "The Mosaic Pavements of Sheikh Zouede
in Northern Sinai," Tesserae: Festschrift fur J. Engemann,
Jahrbuch fiir Antike und Christentum: Erganzungsband 18 (Miins-
ter, 1991): 181-91.
34. Y. Tsafrir, "The Fate of Pagan Cult Places in Palestine,"
Religious and Ethnic Communities, 197-218.
35. P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a
Christian Empire (Madison, WI, 1992): 128-34.
36. Pagans risked being lynched if they attended the Christian
Eucharist: Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza: Correspondance, 822,
ed. 1. Regnault (SabIe-sur-Sarthe, 1972): 497.
37. K. Holum et al., King Herod's Dream: Caesarea on the Sea
(New York, 1988): 170-1.
109
steps and the basilica ofthe Hadrianeum, the ancient temple
of the imperial cult, had been carefully restored. 38
On the ground, it was still possible for a Christian holy
man outside Gaza in the reign of Justinian to advise his clients
how to handle their Jewish and pagan neighbors. Should a
landowner allow a Jew to use his wine-press? Of course he
should:
If, when it rains, God causes the rain to fall on yourfields
and not on those ofthe Jew, then you can refose to press
his grapes. But as He is stillfull oflove for all mankind ...
why, then, should you wish to be inhumane rather than
[like God} merciful?39
He must, of course, refuse invitations to partake in a pagan
festival. But he should refuse politely.
Say to him: You know that those who fear God must keep
all his commandments, and your own customs will
convince you, because for the sake ofyour love towards
me you would never transgress the commands of your
tradition. 40
Cuitic exchanges also occurred, across religious
boundaries. The Nabataean myth ofDusares came to include
a story of virgin birth that echoed the Christian story ofthe
Nativity: "a stunning instance of the contamination of
polytheism by Christianity in Palestine."41 The former Jew,
Count Joseph of Scythopolis, had once been an official of
the Jewish patriarch. He had summoned in from the street a
local lunatic, so as to try upon him an exorcism in the name
of Jesus. The exorcism worked. But Joseph (apparently not
having read Professor MacMullen on the exclusivist effect
of Christian miracles) did not think of converting to
Christianity until decades later. 42 It is details such as these
which, moved a little closer to the center of the narrative,
reveal the entire process of Christianization to have been
very different from what we had supposed from a reading of
most Christian texts.
Late antique Palestine could not be mistaken for the Pa-
lestine of the classical empire. But what made it different
had little to do with current Christian "representations" of
the process ofChristianization. Altogether, given the somber
38. G. Bowersock, "Polytheism and Monotheism in Arabia and
the Three Palestines," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 1-10,
at 7-8.
39. Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza, Correspondance, 686, p.441.
40. Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza, Correspondance, 776,474-75.
41. Bowersock, "Greek Moses," 46. See also G. W. Bowersock,
Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor, MI, 1990): 21-4. For
criticism of these interpretations, however, see J. Fossum, "The
Myth ofthe Eternal Rebirth: Critical Notes on G. W. Bowersock,
Hellenism in Late Antiquity," Vigiliae Christianae 53 (1999):
305-15.
42. Epiphanius, Panarion 30.10.3-5; MacMullen, Christianizing
the Roman Empire, 28.
110
impression of widespread religious conflict communicated
by so many Christian texts, the basically peaceable picture
of late Roman Palestine presented by Glen Bowersock
suggests that the province must rate high (for anyone of us
considering taking up residence in the Later Empire) for
Quality of Life. It could, of course, be argued that Palestine
was exceptional. Its resolute Jewish and Samaritan
communities checked Christian ambitions and, so, indirectly
protected the polytheists of the region. But I wonder if this
is all that there is to it. Intensive modem archaeology and
the reconsideration of vivid fragments of evidence scattered
through Christian texts may, at last, have given us a glimpse
of a relatively normal late antique landscape. It is a landscape
from which the smog of Christian "representations" has been
removed. The North Africa in which Augustine began to be
active as a priest, in 391, and then as bishop, from 395-396,
and in which (as we now know) he preached so vividly
between 397 and 404, may not have been so very different.
It was part of the magic of his own rhetoric to make it seem
altogether another world.
Augustine's sermons to his congregations at Hippo and
Carthage have been called "dialogues with the crowd."43 This
is a somewhat euphemistic designation. The sermons newly
discovered by Franyois Dolbeau in the Stadtbibliothek of
Mainz (hence generally known either as the Dolbeau Ser-
mons or the Sermons de Mayence) show that on one occa-
sion, at Carthage in 404, Augustine had been heckled by his
audience and refused to preach out of pique. 44 We should
bear this in mind. In 397, when the first group of Dolbeau
Sermons may have been preached, Augustine was an
unknown quantity in Carthage, having been ordained bishop
only one or two years previously. Even as late as 404,
Augustine's most trenchant and seemingly self-confident
statements were elicited through dialogue with
congregations, and even with episcopal colleagues, who did
not share his own views. These views were forced to the
fore, in a hurry, by a situation that had hitherto lain beyond
the imaginative horizons of most Christians in Africa and-
I suspect-in many other regions.
Largely through the activities of a group of his colleagues,
to which Augustine had given his wholehearted support on
many issues, the Catholic church in Africa found that, after
generations of relative torpor, it was in a position to take the
offensive. In 399, the pagan temples of Africa were closed
by officials of the Emperor. 45 In 401, the principal rival to
the Catholic church, the "Donatist" church, was challenged,
for the first time ever, to public debate. In the summer of
403, as we now know, Augustine narrowly escaped
43. A. Mandouze, Saint Augustin (paris, 1968): 591-663.
44. Dolbeau Sermon 2, ed. Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons, 316-44,
trans. Hill, Works of Saint Augustine, 331-53.
45. R. Markus, The End ofAncient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990):
107-23.
PETER BROWN
assassination in a Donatist ambush. 46 Further measures for
. the forcible suppression of Donatism were hotly debated
between "hawks" and "doves" in the Catholic episcopate-
Augustine ')1imself being, at that time, on the side of the
"doves."47 This sudden change of pace needed to be
explained to congregations used to an older Christianity and
unprepared for so much drama.
The Dolbeau Sermons enable us to glimpse"through the
very;insistence with which Augustine overrode them, the
hesitations of many Christians. They had grown up with a
very different view of the horizons of the possible for the
Catholic church. To listen to certain passages in the new
sermons is like listening to the sound of a boat scraping its
bottom against a low-lying but resistant sandbank. The ser-
mons reveal a conglomerate of ideas, held by Christians in
good standing, which did not coincide with those of Augus-
tine.
What became increasingly plain to Augustine, as he faced
large congregations, especially on the occasion of truly stellar
invitation performances in Carthage, was that few Christians
in late fourth century Carthage had read their Edward Gib-
I bon and their Arthur Darby Nock, and that-horribile
dictu-they had even omitted to read Max Weber. Above
all, their monotheism, though sincere, was by no means as
coherent as Augustine thought that it should havebeen. They
were convinced that their God, the Christian god, had proved
triumphant. But what this meant in practice was far from
certain. There was still room, in their world, for a pluralistic
vision of society. This was rooted in a collective re-
presentation of the universe that would not be shaken. The
universe itself was strictly compartmentalized.
There are those who say: "God is good, He is great, He
is supreme, eternal and inviolable. It is He who will give
us eternal life and that incorruption which He promised
at the resurrection. But those things ofthe physical world
and of our present time belong to daemones and to the
invisible Powers . .. " They leave God aside, as if these
things did not belong to Him; and by sacrifices, by all
kinds of healing devices, and by the counsel of their
fellows . .. they seek out ways to cope with what concerns
the present life. 48
The Dolbeau Sermons reveal, once again and in great
detail, the extent to which Christians continued to resort to
astrologers, diviners and to healing amulets. They did so
with as little sense of incongruity as a modem believer when
resorting to the benefits of modem medicine. 49
46. Dolbeau Sermon 4.3.49, ed. Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons, 413,
trans. Hill, 266.
47. P. BroWIT;' Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, 1967): 226-35 (re-
print, 222-31) with Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons, 402-7.
48. Augustine, Enarratio in Ps. 34.1.7.
49. e.g. Dolbeau Sermon 25.22-23, ed. Dolbeau, VilJgt-six ser-
mons, 73-4, trans. Hill, 380-1.
 -- - ---- -- - - -- -- - - _--- - -_ --_ --_
CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
The attitudes which Augustine attempted to overcome,
as he preached between 397 and 404, were determined by
what I am tempted to call an "archaic pluralism." I choose
the term deliberately so as to distinguish a resigned attitude
to the continued existence of other religions from modem
notions oftoleration and plurality. But it was a serious view,
with a firm underpinning in contemporary religiosity.
Christians listened with interest to arguments propounded
to them by pagans. Many Christians seem to have agreed
with these arguments, until Augustine pounced upon them.
Pagans pointed out that at no point in the Gospels had Christ
preached the destruction of pagan temples; the only temple
whose end he had predicted was the Jewish Temple of
Jerusalem. 50 In any case, pagan worship had been around
for a long time. Its longevity demanded explanation. Leading
members of Augustine's congregation at Hippo opined that
rites which had been performed, throughout Roman history,
according to the ritual codes laid down by the libri pontifi-
cales, must have enjoyed the tacit favor of God. Pagan
worship was a form of supplementary Old Testament. It was
a venerable religious dispensation, that had been abandoned
by Christians, but that might be maintained by others. It was
only modem forms of magic, which did not hold to the rules
of the libri pontificales, which should be suppressed. For
magic rites were not performed in public and were usually
engaged in for anti-social purposes. 51 The general attitude
towards pagan cult was summed up in the motto: "Do not
worship, but do not mock."52 The Old Religion was there to
stay. It was protected by the shadow of real and active invi-
sible beings, who had an allotted (if lower) place in the
universe and whose care for the things of this world could
never be doubted.
We should be careful to note the highly "supernaturalized"
nature ofthis vision of the world. The horizons ofthe Chris-
tian church were determined by the position, on a map of
the universe, of unseen creatures and by the relations of
Christians to those creatures. To be "converted" to
Christianity implied the abandonment and the subsequent
avoidance of real if invisible agents-the demons. Yet there
were demons and demons. Some demons had been
"domesticated" by their role in the spells, amulets and
divinatory practices used by Christians. Other demons, of
course, were more sinister. Those connected with blood sa-
crifice and with the burning of incense on public altars had
always been regarded as peculiarly abhorrent, and especially
since the time of the Great Persecution of303. The Donatist
church claimed to be the only true Christian church in Africa
50. Augustine, De consensu evangelistarum 1.16.24; see G. Madec,
"Le Christ des parens d'apres Ie De consensu evangelistarum,"
Recherches augustiniennes 26 (1992): 3-67.
51. Augustine, De divinatione daemonum 2.5.
52. Dolbeau Sermon 24.10.257, ed. Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons,
240, trans. Hill, 362.
_--_ - -- -- -- -- --- -
111
precisely because its leaders were believed to have avoided
"pollution" by the stench of sacrifice and ofbumt incense at
the time of that persecution. 53
But one did not have to be a Donatist to hold such views.
In 400, Augustine received a letter from a well-placed person,
Publicola (perhaps a Roman nobleman) who, as a devout
Christian, was deeply concerned with the dangers involved
in contact with sacrificial rites. He was worried about taking
his share of crops blessed by pagan rituals, about eating fruit
found beside pagan altars (for it may have been left there as
an offering to the gods), about washing in baths where pagan
statues stood and where the smell of pagan incense lay heavy
in the air. 54 Augustine considered his questions fussy and
misplaced. But he plainly kept his copy of Publicola's letter
and his own detailed answer to it. For the average, post-
Constantinian Christian, the avoidance of pollution by pagan
rituals, and not the spread ofthe Gospel through the absorp-
tion of pagan populations, remained the primary concern.
Indeed, a strong sense of pollution, clearly focussed on the
act of pagan sacrifice, proved a manageable notion. It left a
large field of ancient life still open to the Christian, provided
that he or she avoided sacrifice, as an unclean act of
superstitio; for a Christian, it was an unnecessary and alien
religious practice, best left to non-Christians. 55 Such a view
implied that paganism lay safely outside one's own
community, that it was the superstitio of others, and that, in
all likelihood, it would be around for a long time.
In encouraging his fellow-believers to step out of this
basically reticent attitude, Augustine was influenced by his
own conversion. Though this had happened a decade
previously, in Milan in 386-387, it was very much in his
thoughts in the period between 397 and 404. His account of
his conversion, in the Confessions, was written at some time
between 396 and 400-that is, at the time ofthe preaching
of the earlier Dolbeau Sermons.
As Karl Morrison has made plain in his recent book,
Conversion and Text, the Confessions present an unusual,
even atypical, narrative of conversion. Augustine seldom
used the words "conversion" or "convert" in connection with
human agents. It is God who "converts," reaching out, often
unexpectedly, to tum hearts to Himself.
For Augustine, conversion is the unfolding of a
supernatural process, initiated and sustained by God . ..
For conversion was a turning to God, not to Christianity
or the Church. 56
53. Brown, Authority and the Sacred, 16-17.
54. Augustine, Letters 46 and 47.
55. M. Salzman, '''Superstitio' in the Codex Theodosianus,"
Vigiliae Christianae 41 (1987): 172-88.
56. K. Morrison, Conversion and Text (Charlottesville, VA, 1992):
ix.
;. ..,. - - <II
"
IIIIUIIII
112
Of course, Augustine was baptized as a Catholic in 387.
But he took that very much for granted. He had grown up in
a largely Christian household, with a mother from a
traditional Christian family, a concubine possibly first
encountered at a Christian festival and a choice of Christian
doctrines--ofwhich Manichaeism, though exotic, counted
as one variant--on which to exercise his intellectual energy.
Paganism was marginal to him. What is notably absent in
the Confessions is that crackle of a demonic presence
associated with the crossing of a real religious frontier. At
least, that was how he chose to present himself in around
397. He had not "converted" to Catholicism. He had been
called by God, and continued to be called by Him, now as a
successful preacher and already a controversial bishop.
It is significant that baptism-the fully visible, sacramen-
tal sign of Christian conversion-was treated by Augustine
as absolutely necessary for salvation, but, at the same time,
as profoundly undramatic. It was not an awe-inspiring ritual
of total renewal, best undertaken by adults. 57 He wished that
he had been baptized as a boy. He took for granted that most
of his hearers were baptized or would soon be baptized. He
made no distinction in his preaching between the demands
he made on the baptized and on the un-baptized Christians.58
We know from a recently discovered letter, that, at the very
end of Augustine's life, Firmus, a well-educated waverer,
excused his delay in undergoing baptism by invoking the
ancient language of the mysteries:
The burden of such a great weight cannot be borne by
the weak . .. For he gives evidence of reverence for the
faith who, to attain the august secrets of the sacred
majesty, approaches its inmost depths with due
hesitation. 59
Augustine simply told Firmus to hurry up. God had called
all persons to baptism. After that, God would give them the
grace that they needed to persevere. In Augustine's eyes, a
sense of the paramount importance of the calling of God
lowered the cultic threshold between the Catholic church
and converts from other religions, and, as a result, implicitly
weakened the protective walls-based on "high density"
notions of pollution and initiation-which the religious
groups in Africa had thrown up around themselves.
57. See P. Brown, "Pelagius and his Supporters: Aims and
Environment," Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 19 (1968):
93-114, in Religion and Society, 183-207, at 198-200, for the
significance ofAugustine's departure from this widespread view.
58. E. Rebillard, "La figure du catechumene et Ie probleme du
delai du bapteme dans la predication d' Augustin," Augustin Pre-
dicateur (395-411) (Paris, 1998): 285-92.
59. Augustine, New Letter 2*.4 and 6, ed. Bibliotheque augusti-
nienne 46B: Lettres 1 *-29* (Paris, 1987): 64 and 68, trans. R.
Eno, Saint Augustine: Letters VI, Fathers of the Church 81
(Washington, DC, 1989): 20 and 21.
PETER BROWN
What Augustine had learned from his conversion,
however, was a sober respect for the power of habit. 60 The
crisis recounted in Book Eight of the Confessions is not a
crisis of f;ith. It is a crisis of the will. Augustine had been
held fast ih the "chain" of habit by his customary need for
sexual satisfaction. 61 This particular chain had been broken.
But even as he wrote about himself, in Book Ten, in a
searching analysis of his present temptations, he saw himself
as a ·frail creature, held back from the full of God
by the subtle weight of habit.
I am reabsorbed by my habitual practices. I am held in
their grip. I weep profoundly, but I am still held. Such is
the strength of the burden of habit. 62
It is a decisive shift in emphasis. "Conversion" had tended
to be represented as an otherworldly battle of the gods.
Through baptism, the Christian stepped from enslavement
to one group of invisible beings to the protection of another,
stronger power. It is an abrupt model of change, in which
time was abolished. Augustine plainly did not share this view.
Despite the mighty and effective act of God, in 386, in setting
, Augustine'S will free to serve Him, Augustine thought of
himself as having remained still largely encased in habit,
caught in the mire of human time.
This was not invariably a negative doctrine. Augustine
wrote the De doctrina christiana (On Christian Learning) at
the same time as he wrote the Confessions. There he
explained that language and culture were simply a set of
habits--conventions, created by human agency. Culture had
not been given to men by the gods, at the beginning oftime,
as many pagans believed and as many Christians feared,
looking anxiously for demons behind every work of classical
literature. 63 Christians, also, could create a "culture," through
creating a series of specific verbal habits. Ever alert to the
role of custom, Augustine noted that the language of the
Psalms had already become so widespread that Hebraic turns
of phrase affected popular speech. He even hoped that
believers might come to adopt an "ecclesiastical norm" of
speech, by referring to the days of the week, not by the names
of the gods, but as "Primaferia," "Secundaferia," and so
on. By this optimistic criterion, only Portugal and Brazil
can count as fully "Christianized" countries!64
A sense of the weight of the past also gave density to
human customs whose validity others denied. A new ser-
mon almost certainly p;eached in 397 shows that the new
60. Brown, Augustine ofHippo, 149-50 and 173-4 (reprint, 142-4
and 167-8).
61. Augustine, Confessions 8.5.10.
62. Augustine, Confessions 10.40.65.
63. R. Markus, Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient
Christianity (Liverpool, 1996): 105-46.
64. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2.13.20; Enarratio in
Ps. 933.
 ·- - -- - -- - _. --- . - - -_- -
CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
bishop was prepared to part company with Jerome and with
the entire Greek world on the value of Jewish custom in the
early days of Christianity. 65 Augustine insisted that the rebuke
delivered by Saint Paul to Saint Peter (reported-in Paul's
Letter to the Galatians) was a real rebuke; and that Peter
had really maintained Jewish customs. The debate was not a
"put-up job," as Jerome and the Greek Fathers claimed. In
their view, Peter must have abandoned circumcision and
kosher instantly, in a single, time-destroying moment, on
his acceptance ofthe novel Christian dispensation. Augus-
tine was not so sure. It was unlikely that Peter and those
around him would drop Jewish rites with abhorrence, as one
might reject pagan sacrifice. Custom had made these rites
dear to the first Jewish Christians. They were like the body
of a beloved parent: though lifeless, they must be carried
reverently, and slowly, to the grave. 66 This new sermon
betrays, in an unexpected manner, Augustine's unusual sense
of the density of time.
Other customs, of course, did not elicit such benevolence.
We now know, from a great sermon preached on the Kalends
of January in 404, that Catholics made a habit of bowing to
kiss the columns at the entrance to the shrines of the mar-
tyrS.67 Educated pagans pointed out, that in so doing, they
were behaving just as their own imperiti, religiously ill-
informed fellow-pagans, had always behaved to statues and
temples. In their attacks on the gods, Christians mistook the
true meaning of pagan cult for popular abuses, such as the
uneducated Christian rank and file also practiced. Augus-
tine pounced on the incident. He preached against the practice
with an austerity which may have ensured that the Dolbeau
Sermons (which had been copied in the Carthusian monastery
ofMainz at the end ofthe fifteenth century) were not printed
in that Catholic city in the time of the Reformation, and so
had to linger in a nondescript manuscript, until they were
discovered in 1990. Faced with the issue of popular supers-
titions, the bishop of Hippo could sound only too like Cal-
vin! Yet other Christian leaders-Augustine's friend,
Paulinus at Nola (on the edge of the partly-pagan Abruzzi)
and John Chrysostom (a singularly conscientious pastor in
65. Dolbeau Sermon 10, first edited in Revue benedictine 102
(1992), now in Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons, 37-67, trans. Hill,
167 -79. On the wider background to the dispute, see now
R. Hennings, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Augustinus und
Hieronymus, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31 (Leiden,
1994): 29-34 and 110-30 and Brown, Augustine of Hippo, re-
print 448-51. Now dated to 405 by Hombert, Nouvelles recher-
ches, 347-354.
66. Do/beau Sermon 10.6.140, ed. Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons,
49, trans. Hill, 170-1.
67. Dolbeau Sermon 26. 10.229-11.237, first edited in Recher-
ches augustiniennes 26 (1992), now in Dolbeau, Vingt-six ser-
mons, 98, trans. Hill, 188.
-
113
Antioch, a large, multi-religious city)--accepted the practice
as an altogether unproblematic gesture of respect. 68
What Augustine had seen (and ensured that others would
see) was that imperitia (culpable religious ignorance) and
superstitio (misplaced devotion) were not phenomena that
existed only outside the Christian communities. He
abandoned the starkly dichotomous rhetoric of the Chris-
tian Apologists, where Christianity was true religion and
everything else was superstitio. As early as 391, when he
wrote against the Manichees, he was quite prepared to ad-
mit that the Catholic communities contained "those who,
although members of the true religion, are superstitious."69
Modem familiarity with the notions of "superstition" and
"popular belief' in Catholic Christianity should not lead us
to underestimate the sharp sense of irony with which Augus-
tine wrote those words. He had closed a chapter in the early
Christian representation of the world. 70
The existence of imperitia within the Church, as a force
of habit which permeated entire congregations, provided
Augustine and his colleagues with the mental tools with
which to undertake a major reform in Catholic piety, from
391 onwards. In Africa as elsewhere, the drinking of wine
and the sharing of food at the grave had been regarded as an
immemorial Christian funerary custom. 71 Wine, song and
even dancing, had long been part ofthe festivals of the saints.
For each martyr's festival was a miniature Easter. It was a
moment of stunning, supernatural triumph over death and
pain, that shook the boundaries ofthe possible. The faithful
participated in that triumph with the accustomed, earthy
ingredients of any victory celebration.72 For Augustine, this
was no more than a sign of the tenacity of pagan customs,
first brought into the Church after the end of the persecutions.
'This was how he explained the matter to old-fashioned
parishioners who, quite understandably, wondered why such
customs should now be abolished.
When peace was made after very violent persecutions,
crowds ofpagans were anxious to come over to the Chris-
tian name, but were hindered by the fact that they were
accustomed to spend their feast days with their idols in
drunkenness and excessive banqueting, and could not
abstain from those baneful pleasures, to which they had
68. P. Brown, "Augustine and a practice ofthe imperiti," Augustin
Predicateur, 367-75, at 368-70. See now D. Trout, Paulinus of
Nola (Berkeley, 1999): 173-86.
69. Augustine, De moribus manichaeorum 1.34.75.
70. Brown, "Augustine and a practice of the imperiti," 370-3.
71. P.A. Fevrier, "A propos du culte funeraire: culte et sociabi-
lite," Cahiers archeologiques 26 (1977): 29-45. See now Eric
Rebillard, Religion et sepulture. L 'Eglise, les vivants et les morts
dans l'Antiquite tardive (paris, 2003): 162-173.
72. P. Brown, "Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity," Early
Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 1-24 at 3-10.
114
become so deeply accustomed. So our predecessors
thought it good to make concessions for the time being
to these weaker brethren. 73
There is, in fact, little evidence that such mass conver-
sions ever occurred in fourth century Hippo. Nor is there
evidence that the clergy regarded what, until then, had
counted as Christian forms of celebration as having been
tainted by a pagan origin.74 What matters is that the notion
of custom was deployed, with vigor, by Augustine, to justify
a reform of Catholic devotion at the shrines of the martyrs.
The new Dolbeau Sermons reveal this reform to have been
characterized by unparalleled determination. Couched in
terms of a victory over ignorance and bad habits, it was a
victory over "paganism" within the Church itself. By 404, a
new sermon, appositely entitled On Obedience, declared the
reform to have been successful:
When, in those days, the din of dirty songs was heard,
now it is the singing ofhymns that lifts the roof. .. where
God was once offended, God is now turned to mercy. 75
In other Christian regions, such language would only have
been used to celebrate the victory of Christianity over non- '
Christian, "demonic" cults. 76
The next years showed that such certainty boded ill for
pagans and Donatists. The bishops petitioned for the
curtailing of pagan festivals, not because they were connected
with sacrifice, but simply because they were disorderly and
a source of "bad habits. "77 In the same manner, Augustine
soon came to justify the application of imperial laws to
disband the Donatist Church. He presented these laws as a
blow against the inert habits of the masses. By separating
the Donatist clergy from their flocks, through exile and the
confiscation of their churches, the imperial laws broke down
the ''wall of hardened custom" that had protected the imperiti,
the ignorant but educable rank and file of the Donatists, from
exposure to the claims of Catholic truth. 78
Augustine's rhetoric of "evil custom" effected a major
imaginative shift. Non-Catholic religious groups were no
longer protected from each other, as it were, by an invisible
electric fence of belief in demonic presences and by the fear
73. Augustine, Letter 29.9.
74. P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in
Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981): 27-30.
75. Dolbeau Sermon 2.5.95, ed. Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons, 330,
trans. Hill, 334.
76. As in the case of the church ofEzraa (Syria) which claimed to
have been founded over a pagan temple: Corpus Inscriptionum
Graecarum 4, nO.8627 (Berlin, 1877): 295.
77. Council of Carthage (June 401) in Registri ecclesiae
Carthaginensis excerpta 60, ed. C. Munier, Corpus
Christianorum 149 (Turnhout, 1974): 197.
78. P. Brown, "Saint Augustine's Attitude to Religious Coercion,"
Religion and Society, 271.
PETER BROWN
of pollution. Augustine kept the demons very much in the
background. In his opinion, the demons merely took
advantage, as iffrom a distance, ofthe profound vulnerability
to the of custom into which the human race had fallen. 79
In Augtistine's view of the world, there could be no tacit
"franchise" for the powers of the lower world, who might,
through paganism, still be thought to offer lower rites, suited
. to lower needs. Long-standing religious .divergences-
pagans and Christians, and between di.ffering gr?UPS
of Christians-no longer enjoyed the protectIon of an Ima-
ginative statute of limitations, which reasoned that, if God
had not made his anger clear by now, there must be some
reason for them to be there. Now it seemed that what made
these groups different from each other were no more than
little walls of human custom. Within the church, the
districtiores christiani, the "more stringent Christians" (who
were often, although not always, members of the clergy) were
obliged to challenge the imperitia of their own rank and file. 80
Outside the church, Catholics were faced by the hardened,
human custom of pagans and Donatists. Ever-consistent in
his wide-arching vision, Augustine made an exception for
the enduring customs of the Jews. God intended that these
should not vanish from the face of the earth. 81 The others
were little mud banks of misdirected human habit, destined
to be swept away in the flash flood of an expanding Catholic
church. As a theorist of religious coercion, Augustine looked
through the diversity of his opponents not by "demonizing" !
them but, precisely, by being the first late antique Christian I
thinker to have thoroughly "humanized" the reasons for their
continued difference from himself.
Nobody has to love Augustine for such views. But the
historian must remember that these novel opinions and their
eventual reception into the mainstream of Western
Catholicism betrayed a generational change. The issue is:
what kind of change was it, and what caused it? Here we
must be careful. The message which a modern reader is
almost certain to derive from a first reading of Augustine's
preaching-and especially from the long, new Dolbeau Ser-
1 I
!
mons of around 403-404-was that the Christian Church
had become more intolerant, more ambitious, more self-con-
t
I
fident and more intrusive in its claims. But to take this view
may well be to fall into the trap which Christian evidence I
has set for us. Just because, as Christian preachers, they made
the greatest noise, does not mean that Augustine and his
colleagues determined the pace of change in the western
Roman empire as a whole. The high pitch of Augustine's
!
preaching must be set against the overall hum of a wider •
•
and rapidly changing world.
79. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 310-1 (reprint, 309-10).
80. Consultationes Zacchaei et Apollonii 1.28, ed. G. Morin (Bonn,
1935): 35.
81. P. Frederiksen, "Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on
Jews and Judaism," Journal ofEarly Christian Studies 3 (1995):
299-325, esp. at 316-7.

CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
There is another side to the story. In the course of the
fifth century, the Christian state began to weaken in the West.
As a result, the Catholic clergy were left to fend for
themselves. This represented a significant change from the
conditions of the post-Constantinian empire. In the fourth
century, the emperors had held the high ground. It was they
who controlled the rhetoric ofChristianization. They did so
by communicating a general air of "all speed ahead" for an
entire, imperial society, under the official protection of the
"name of Christ" and by ordering the closing of temples and
by banning sacrifice, through the sweeping "criminalization"
of religious views different from their own. 82 From the middle
of the fifth century, however, this vocal Christian state
receded in the West. The bishops felt themselves to be on
their own to a far greater extent than they had felt under the
post-Constantinian Roman empire. They often enjoyed a
strong position as local leaders. It was now up to them to
maintain the momentum of Christianization in their region.
As a result, Christianization became linked ever more closely
to the problem of pastoral care. 83 Augustine's language of
"custom" allowed the process ofChristianization to be seen
no longer as a series of spectacular interventions, of largely
imperial origin, that brought about a definitive "end of
paganism." Instead, Christianization was increasingly seen
as no more than the natural extension ofthe clergy's duty to
instruct their flocks and to exhort them to overcome bad
habits of all kinds.
Whatever the realities of the situation may have been (and
one suspects the long survival of pagan cult in many areas),
paganism was no longer perceived as "out there." It was no
longer treated as an intact religious system, still viewed with
a mixture of fear and fascination. The clergy now presented
themselves as facing a more domesticated situation. They
had to do the occasional spring cleaning. They denounced
certain religious practices (most of which took place on the
margins of authentically Christian festivals) as the spurcitiae
gentilium, as the "dirt" of paganism, tracked in to the church
over time from an ill-defined pagan past. These practices
were "pagan survivals" in the strict sense. They betrayed,
not the eerie presence of the gods, but the dull force of habit
in the faithful. 84 It was the duty of the clerical experts to tell
the ill-informed rustici (the heirs of Augustine's imperiti,
who were usually, but not inevitably, the countryfolk of Gaul
and Spain) the meaning of actions of whose dire significance
82. Brown, Authority and the Sacred, 11-5. See now M. T. Fagen,
Die Enteignung der Wahrsager: Studien zum kaiserlichen
Wissensmonopol in der Spiitantike (Frankfurt, 1993). / Period of the Slav-Avar Settlement in the Area between the Da-
83. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and
Diversity AD 200-1000, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003): 145-54.
84. e.g. Council of Tours (567) 23, ed. C. de Clercq, Concilia
Galliae A.51J-A. 695, Corpus Christianorum 148A (1Umhout,
1963): 191.
."'
II:":
"
115
the rustici themselves may have been merrily unaware. 85
Modem notions of "popular religion," of "superstition" and
of "pagan survivals" owe much to this unsung Triumph of
the Therapeutic in the early medieval West. 86
Like all powerful representations, this view of the long-
term process ofthe Christianization of Europe excluded cru-
cial areas of experience. I suspect that there was extensive
"self-Christianization" outside the margins of the Christian
Church. We should not exaggerate the institutional strength
and the powers of expansion of the Catholic Church in early
medieval Europe. Large areas, especially those affected by
the withdrawal of the Roman frontiers, remained profoundly
unchurched between the fifth and the seventh centuries. 87
More important still, the world remained populated by
enterprising persons deeply curious about the supernatural,
for whom the proximity of Christianity acted not as a damper,
but as a positive spur to occult activity. We usually glimpse
them in hagiography. They are cast in the role of momentary
competitors to the local Christian holy man. 88 But we should
not underestimate the extent of the penumbra of self-
Christianized persons, for whom the arrival of Christ and
access to rituals performed in his name, meant (as it had
meant to ancient persons, as described by Arthur Darby
N ock) the sudden availability of a new god, "who had come
in the freshness of his vigor." Such a "new god" came often
not to suppress but to revive and to supplement the ancient
cultS. 89 To take one small but revealing example of the 1":',
,.
process of bricolage between Christian and non-Christian
communities that must have occurred all over Europe and I".:1
Asia: in 591, a party of Turks from Inner Asia surprised the .'
imperial court at Constantinople by appearing with the sign
of the Cross tattooed on their foreheads.
85. e.g. W. Klingshim, Caesarius ofAries: The Making ofa Chris-
tian Community in Gaul (Cambridge; New York, 1994): 201-43.
See now R. Rothaus, "Christianization and De-paganization: The
Late Antique Creation of a Conceptual Frontier," Shifting
Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. R.W. Mathisen and H. Sivan
(Aldershot, 1996): 299-308.
86. Dieter Harmening, Superstitio: uberlieferungs- und
theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-
theologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin,
1979).
87. D. Watts, Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain (London,
1991) and R. Bratoz, "Ecclesia in gentibus. Vprasanje prezivetja
krscanstva iz antiecne dobe v casu slovansko-avarske naselitre
na prostoru med Jadranom in Donavo", (Ecclesia in gentibus.
Traces of the Survival of Christianity from Antiquity into the
nube and the Adriatic), ed. V. Rajsp, Grafenaueljev Zbornik (Lju-
bljana, 1996): 205-25.
88. Brown, Authority and the Sacred, 67-8; V. Flint, The Rise of
Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1991).
89. Nock, Conversion, 94.
116
They declared that they had been assigned this by their
mothers; for when a fierce plague was endemic among
them, some Christians advised them that the foreheads
of their young be tattooed with that sign. 90
In the same way, it appears that, by the early eighth
century, the clear, nominal frontier between the Christian
kingdom of the Franks and the pagan tribes of central
Germany had been effectively washed away by constant
cultic borrowings. 9! The famous Saxon and Irish missionaries
of the mid-eighth century merely filled in, with an accepta-
ble, brightly colored wash of ecclesiastical organization, a
picture that had already been sketched out, through
generations of contact, in more muted tones. Such low-pro-
file interchanges had no place in current representations of
"missionary" activity. But they happened. 92
In the light of this evidence, we should revise our picture
of the nature of the "pagan survivals" that were denounced
in this period. Some "survivals," at least, cannot be explained
by the scenario we have long been accustomed to imagine.
We assume that cowed and sullen populations maintained
their own customs beneath the veneer of Christian
ceremonies imposed upon them. But concern for "pagan'
survivals" may have been driven by the exact opposite of
such a situation: by the presence of a wide penumbra of
persons who had Christianized themselves, by adept cultic
experimentation, without asking the opinion of the experts.
Enterprising experimenters in Christianity weighed in upon
the Church quite as much as the Church weighed down upon
them.
It is in these ways that we can trace the process of
Christianization in a very different manner from that with
which we began, in our review of the historiography of the
1960s. Put briefly, a concern to assess the objective limits
of the process of conversion to Christianity, by measuring
the impact of the power of the late Roman state upon resistant
populations, has been replaced by greater interest in the
process of Christianization as this was perceived by
contemporaries, and especially in the horizons ofthe possi-
ble for such a process as these changed over the generations.
A representation of instant triumph within a Christian em-
pire came to be replaced, in Western Europe, by a more
somber representation of the power of custom among popu-
lations entrusted to the pastoral care ofthe Catholic Church.
90. Theophylact Simocatta, Histories 5.10.5.
91. D. Green, "The Influence of the Merovingians on the Chris-
tian Vocabulary of German," Franks and Alamanni in the
Merovingian Period, ed. 1. N. Wood (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998):
343-61. For the background of such exchanges, see 1. N. Wood,
"The frontiers of Westem Europe: developments east of the Rhine
in the sixth century," The Sixth Century: Production, Distribu-
tion and Demand, ed. R Hodges and W. Bowden (Leiden, 1998):
231-53.
92. Brown, The Rise a/Western Christendom, 2nd ed., 408-433.
PETER BROWN
This change of representations points to a wider problem,
of more abstract interest. What is at stake in all this, of course,
is an in,choate view of history. The question which faced
Christians
I
in the world of late antiquity was how much of
the past could be put in the past, and how much could be
allowed to linger in the present. All over the Christian world
of late antiquity, we hear fragments of a muffled dialogue
,,?n the nature of the passing of time. Such persistent thought
09 continuity and discontinuity is a somewhat rare
phenomenon in traditional societies. It is worthy of our at-
tention. Faced by this debate, I remain struck, above all, by
the extent to which it varied from region to region and from
century to century. Eastern Christians still felt that they were
held within the framework of an unshaken empire. They
tended to favor a view dominated by the themes of triumph
and replacement. 93 After Constantine, Christianity simply
entered a new age. It was the ancient world turned upside
down with Christ now on top. A later Armenian source
describes fifth-century Egypt as eastern Christians would
have wished to see it:
Its leader is no longer that Pluto . .. but Mark with the
preaching of the Gospel. No longer do there exist tombs
ofheroes descendedfrom dragons, but splendid martyria
of the saints. No longer on the twenty-jifth of Tubi is
celebrated the superstitious festival of the crowning of
the beasts of burden, the worshipping of serpents and
the distribution ofcakes; but on the eleventh ofthe same
month of Tubi is celebrated the Epiphany of the Lord,
the praising of the victorious martyrs, the welcoming of
strangers and the giving ofpresents to the poor. No lon-
ger do they sacrifice to the evil demon Serapis, but they
offer the sacrifice of Christ s blood 94
And for a world to be seen to have been triumphantly
turned upside down, its ancient foundations must be left
clearly in view. At Ephesus, the statues of Livia and Augustus
continued to stand, throughout late antiquity, outside the
Prytaneion. But they now had the sign ofthe cross elegantly
carved upon their foreheads. 95
The notion of the power of surviving pagan custom was
not unknown in the Greek Christian world. But it was not a
dominant notion. It was not invoked in the public rhetoric
of reform until the very end of the seventh century, at the
93. Brown, Authority and the Sacred, 25. cf. J. Lotman and B.
Uspenskij, "The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian
Culture," The Semiotics a/Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexan-
der D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, NY, 1985):
5.
94. Moses Khorenats'i, History a/the Armenians 3.62, trans. R
W. Thomson (Cambridge, MA, 1978): 338.
95. 0. Hjort, "Augustus Christianus-Livia Christiana: Sphragis
and Roman Portrait Sculpture," Aspects 0/ Late Antiquity and
Early Byzantium, ed. L. Ryden and J. Rosenqvist (Stockholm,
1993): 99-112.
CONVERSION AND CHRISTIANIZATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CASE OF AUGUSTINE
Quinisext Council in Trullo, held in the domed hall of the
imperial palace in 692. It was no coincidence that the Council
in Trullo should have met at a time when the self-confidence
of the Christian empire had been shaken by the rise of Is-
lam. 96 It was now up to the Church to stem the tide of defeat,
by purging from its own congregations the traces of "pagan
customs" that had caused the wrath of God to fall upon the
empire. Even performing bears were now deemed to be
deleterious. They were singled out as instances of the
"Hellenic customs" that had been allowed to remain too long
within the Church. 97 Creatures of habit, the bears were still
therein 1551. TheStoglav, the Moscow Council ofaHundred
Chapters, condemned those amiable quadrupeds, once again,
in the language ofthe Council in Trullo. They were shuffling
reminders, in far-away Muscovy, of "the perverse customs
of the pagan Greeks."98
Well before the Byzantine Council in Trullo, the clergy
of the post-Augustinian West had irrevocably embraced the
"representation" of Christianization which saw the spread
of Christianity as an unrelieved battle with the past. This
was a past at once remote and ever-present. By reason ofthe
tenacity of custom, it was a past that simply would not go
away. It is the representation with which so many scholars
96. J. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century; the Transforma-
tion ofa Culture (Cambridge; New York, 1990): 317-37. On the
survival of animal sacrifice in Christian festivals, see now B.
Lourie, "From Jerusalem to Axum through the Temple of Salo-
mon" (in Russian), Khristianskii Vostok 2, 8 (2000): 137-207, at
202-6.
97. Council in Trullo canon 61, with the commentary of the twelfth-
century canon lawyer, Theodore Balsamon, inPatrologia Graeca
137: 717D-732A. On Balsamon, see M. T. Fagen, "Balsamon
on Magic: from Roman Secular Law to Byzantine Canon Law,"
Byzantine Magic, ed. H. Maguire (Washington, DC, 1995)': 99-
115 and M. Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the
Comneni (Cambridge; New York, 1995): 457-67.
98. Stoglav 93, ed. D. E. Kozhanchikov (St. Petersburg, 1863):
264, trans. E. Duchesne, Le Stoglav ou les Cent Chapitres (pa-
ris, 1920): 245.
117
still work, as they attempt to understand the great change
known to us as The Conversion of Europe. 99
Looking back, it seems as if it is Augustine who is the
ultimate source of many of the systematic errors of
interpretation with which we still have to battle in interpreting
this change. But, of course, there are two Augustines. There
is Augustine the pastor, who spoke especially loud and
confidently (as in the new Dolbeau Sermons) so as to be .: .
,
heard at all by congregations whose worldview did not
necessarily overlap with his own. But then there is Augus-
tine the convert, who had to grapple with the reality of time.
This is the Augustine long known to us as the author of the
Confessions. But with the discovery of the Dolbeau Ser-
mons, there is now also an Augustine whom we had not seen
so clearly before: Augustine the staunch defender against
fellow-Christians of the weighty continuity between the
Jewish past and the Christian present, as the New Testament
dispensation grew majestically-but slowly, and at a human
pace-out ofthe Old. Here was a thinker who had grappled,
on so many levels, with the intractable density of human
time. For this reason, Augustine stands at the beginning of a
peculiar, Western sense of the past. For good or ill, in this,
at least, we historians of late antiquity are his heirs.
>i
I',.,
:'1
99. R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, 371-1386 A.D. (Lon- :""'1
don, 1997) provides a vivid and intelligent narrative. :1'
· . - -- -----

BIBLIOTHEQUE DE L' ANTIQUITE TARDIVE

PUBLIEE PAR L' ASSOGJATION POUR L' ANTIQUITE TARDIVE

THE PAST BEFORE US

THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORIOGRAPHIES

OF LATE ANTIQUITY

Edited by
Carole STRAW et
, Richard LIM

f
,I

BREPOLS
• 'fl
I
f
=:==----
I I

I
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© 2004, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,
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Printed in the B.D. on acid-free paper
The cover shows an image of Megalopsychia, the female personification of the spirit ofliberality, that decorates the center
of a large mosaic floor pavement in the so-called Yaqto House in Daphne, a luxurious suburb of ancient Antioch. Now in the
Hatay Archaeological Museum, Antakya, Turkey, inv. no. 1016. Published here by kind permission of the Hatay Archaeological
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 Contents

Foreword of the editors of the series ..................................................................................................... 8

Avant-propos des 6diteurs de la collection ........................................... :................................................ 8
Acknowledgements from the editors of the volume ....... 00 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 8
Notes on Contributors ...................................................................................: ........................................ 9

Carole Straw and Richard Lim

Introduction ........................................................................... ,'.......................................................•..... .11
Glen W. Bowersock
Centrifugal Force in Late Antique Historiography .............................................................................. 19
Claude LepeUey
The Perception of Late Roman Africa,
from Decolonization to the Re-Appraisal of Late Antiquity ............................................................... 25
LeIlia Cracco Ruggini
The Italian City from the Third to the Sixth Century:
"Broken History" or Ever-Changing Kaleidoscope? ........................................................................... 33
N. G Garsoi'an
Armenian Historiography in Crisis ...................................................................................................... 49
Elizabeth A. Clark
Rewriting the History of Early Christianity ......................................................................................... 61
Averil Cameron
History and the Individuality of the Historian: The Interpretation of Late Antiquity .......................... 69
Evelyne Patlagean
Sorting out Late Antique Poverty in Paris around the '60s ................................................................. 79
Philip Rousseau
The Historiography of Asceticism: Current Achievements' and Future Opportunities ........................ 89
Peter Brown
Conversion and Christianization in Late Antiquity: The Case of Augustine ..................................... 103